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I had some friends who were fully sold on Peak Oil for a few years. Basically: we were about to hit the point where supply of oil was going to fall below demand once and for all, and there was no viable replacement, so prices were going to skyrocket, societies would grind to a halt, wars would start over the dwindling oil resources, and we were going to be living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland within 10 years.
In ~2009, the price of oil hit a record high of nearly $200/barrel. This was at the tail end of a sharp jump, after 20 years of steadily-rising oil prices. One of my friends was pretty obsessed, and had been reading blogs and listening to podcasts, and had all kinds of facts & figures on oil production, known reserves, predicted demand, etc, and they all seemed to point to a crisis. He predicted a price of $300 or higher per barrel within a year, and that was just the beginning.
So we made a bet on where oil prices were going to be in 5 years. He said (with absolute confidence) $300+, I said somewhere under the current price of $200.
It ended up being under $100/barrel. Nobody talks about "Peak Oil" anymore.
(I won't say where I got my confidence that oil prices would stabilize and fall, because that would just invite a barrage of downvotes and angry arguments...)
Which is funny because logically speaking we draw closer to "peak oil" every day.
Well, yes, but if it's far enough into the future it's kind of irrelevant. We can transition away from oil.
That was a key part of the argument at the time: there is no replacement! At that point, solar was much, much less efficient, wind was very much in the 'early experimental' phase, 'nuclear' was still a dirty word, electric cars were a joke, corn-based hydrogen was still a fresh and embarrassing failure, etc etc. No country at that point had ever grown their GDP without using significantly more oil & coal. The rhetoric was very much that we were stuck with gas cars forever, and everything else was a silly pipe dream.
The world has changed dramatically in the meantime--largely because oil prices started rising so dramatically.
LOL. That was a fun story. Reminds me of that one time a friend of mine claimed with 100% confidence that physical money would be gone within a few years. Then again, he isn’t exactly mentally stable so that could explain a lot.
Well, your friend wasn't totally crazy (nor was mine TBH, the trends looked bad). A few countries have more or less eliminated paper money. India was a very high-profile one, because lots of older people in India had savings stored under the mattress or whatever that were scheduled to become worthless...they had to postpone it a couple times. And a few European countries (I wanna say Finland? maybe Estonia?) have more or less got rid of physical currency.
A person might see those datapoints and extrapolate from that that it's only a matter of time before all countries would be paperless, without accounting for differences in culture. I can't see the US getting rid of paper currency...uhh...anytime soon, let's say.
Can confirm that thing about Finland. Physical currency has been eliminated almost entirely. Or well… at least the need for physical currency is pretty much gone at the moment, but some people still use it.
When it comes to buying and selling stuff between individuals, It’s not uncommon to find a person who won’t accept mobile payments, but wants paper instead. All the stores obviously accept paper and metal, but more and more people pay with a card or a phone. There are some excetional stores that only accept electronic payments, but that’s limited to small companies that can’t be bothered to deal with coins. All the medium and large stores have the means to accept both physical and electronic payments.
I can’t exactly remember when that prediction was supposed to come true, but I think it was something like 2010 or something like that. Seeing how slowly these things actually change, I would guess it’s going to take like 50 years untill all payments are fully electronic and physical currency is fully eliminated. Could take longer. Who knows.
Haha, I bet you're both talking about the same guy. How's his positions on BTC and GME?
I haven’t been in contact with him in years, but I’ll try to remember if I bump into him in the future.